Valve pulls erotic indie game from Steam Greenlight

The PC developer Valve has pulled a game from its indie community site Steam Greenlight.

Greenlight is a community within the digital distribution platform of Steam, where users vote on the indie games they want to see appear in the storefront. The self-styled erotic game Seduce Me appeared, started to receive community votes, and was suddenly pulled down.

Seduce Me’s developer No Reply received an email from Valve stating the developer had violated the Greenlight terms, and the game had been removed.

No Reply’s game designer Miriam Bellard told GamesIndustry International, “It struck us as them not wanting to deal with it, not wanting to engage,”

Bellard expressed disappointment in the decision and said, “I think Valve is in a position where they could push this if they wanted to. Sure, they might lose a very small amount of their audience, but they would gain others… Why they’ve chosen not to is possibly that they’re part of that American culture, and they view this issue with that American point-of-view.”

The designer went on to comment on the relative lack of adult-themed games and said, “There’s still that historical view of games being for children, and even though the average gamer is now 30 yeas old it’s still the gut reaction.”

Bellard also lamented at how the erotica game genre has no venue, and said, “That there’s no content like this is exacerbated by the fact that there’s nowhere for it to be sold. Once content starts to appear, places will be found for it to live, which will encourage other people to make that kind of content.”